andrew said:
It is perhaps worth noting that Marcello deserves some recognition for this.
i'll give marcello the "recognition" he "deserves" for this... *** here's the deal. marcello is a "technocrat". that's a word i made up, to refer to a person who's a _bureaucrat_ working in a _tech_ arena. like their fellow bureaucrats -- in the government and the corporations -- the technocrats operate by taking a _simple_ thing and making it _confusing_, so as to consolidate their _power_ over us people, since they are now the only ones who understand the thing which was formerly simple for all to grasp. the technocrats _love_ their reputation as "experts", just like a man with erection deficiency loves viagra. so complicated is _always_ better for the technocrat. such it is with the p.g. catalog. and with electronic-book catalogs in _general._ for, you see, marcello is not the only technocrat. not by a long shot. there is a whole slew of 'em, and they've permeated the electronic-book scene. these technocrats made an "e-book catalog standard". it's called o.p.d.s., and just like good bureaucrats do, they've built a regulation. technocrats call it a "spec", which is short for "specification", but you get the idea -- it's just like a government regulation, chock-full of the jargon, obtuse language, unnecessary complexities, and acronyms craved by bureaucrats the world over... anyway, i'm sure you can google the o.p.d.s. spec, if you wanna see how they mucked e-book catalogs. let's remind ourselves, because we need reminding, that a catalog _should_ be quite the _simple_ thing. look at the original prototype -- the card catalog -- and see that it's just a set of cards that contain the basic information about a book (e.g., title, author, date of publication, number of pages, and so on), _combined_with_ a pointer to the book in the stacks, so you know where to find the shelf whereon it sits... pretty darn simple stuff. no need to get complicated. unless you're a bureaucrat that is, one who wants to make things complicated, as a bald grab for power... if you look at the o.p.d.s. spec, you'll see complexity. indeed, even the technocrats that built that spec say you will need an expert to create an o.p.d.s. catalog. now go look again at jim's "magic catalog". what is it? it's just an electronic version of a simple card-catalog. it's a list of titles (e.g., information about the books) which are links (e.g., pointers to the books' locations). it should be _easy_ for any person to create a catalog. _pointer_ combined with _information_about_the_book_ _pointer_ combined with _information_about_the_book_ _pointer_ combined with _information_about_the_book_ simple as pie. but if it was _that_ easy, anybody could do it, and thus the bureaucrats would lose their jobs and power, and nobody would ooh-and-ahh about how smart they are. so they had to muck it up, and make it all complicated, so only _they_ can create catalogs, so if they deign to "do us a favor" by making a catalog, we fall at their feet, worship them, and give 'em the thanks and "recognition" that they "deserve" for having been so wonderful to us... so this is a win-win deal for all the technocrats. the ones making the "standard" get their power enhanced because marcello used it, and marcello enhances _his_ power-base, because now he gets the credit for making the p.g. catalog. which is such a hard thing that only an expert could do it. but all of this is just one big hoodwink. because earlier, _anyone_ could have made a catalog, but now you need a _technocrat_ who is familiar with the spec. before, we could have made the catalog do anything that we wanted, because it was simple, and easy to understand. now it's a complex animal, so we have to be happy with whatever the technocrats give us, no matter how lame... they starve us, then give us scraps, so we'll be thankful. and somehow, we are so stupid that we fall for this trick.
Before the form of the catalog that he created, that made it possible for Stanza to include the often updated list that you mention, all that Stanza had on offer from PG was a static list of texts that never got updated, and could not be searched in as many ways.
this part _really_ made me laugh. that "static list of texts that never got updated" used to be updated all the time, on a regular basis. until, that is, marcello stopped doing updates on it. why did he stop? because he had created a _new_ version of the p.g. catalog, his _technocrat_ version, and he knew the existing "list of texts" -- in plain ascii, which _any_of_us_ could easily understand and use -- would've never been voluntarily abandoned by people. so he had to make it worthless, so we would only have _his_ technocrat catalog, so we'd be dependent on him. the "new" catalog is a great example of x.m.l. bloatware. so of course you must be a technocrat "expert" to use it. but yes, andrew, now that you have given appropriate "recognition" to your master marcello, perhaps he will see fit to serve you an extra-big portion of gruel today. -bowerbird